Checking out HootCourse

I'm creating a course called OTAN on HootCourse. The hashtag is #otanhoot. It's a great idea to create an interface that helps teachers conceptualize how to use Twitter for course work and communication. HootCourse relies on Twitter and Facebook for course creation and content, so there is no unique sign in. You can sign in with either your Twitter or Facebook signin. I can write a post on the HootCourse site that will be automatically posted here on Blogger.

Not only that, but I can embed the whole course right here, and post from here. Can you post to Twitter from here too? Oops, I see you don't have to add the course tag, HootCourse does that for you.

Twitter at COABE

Last year I was the lonely tweeter at the COABE conference. This year, and the combined COABE/Proliteracy conference there were at least 10 of us - progress!! Go to Twitter and search for the tag #chgo10 to check out the conference. #adulted will also give some good results.

Twitter at COABE

I want to write about the COABE conference, (national adult education conference) but for now, I'm just going to comment that there was a lot of interest in Twitter. I think Ashton Kutscher and Larry King can be thanked for that! I twittered the conference, and encouraged others. So far I don't think anyone joined me, but I got a number of follows for OTAN.

In my workshop on Web 2.0 Tools for Administrators, the first thing they wanted to hear about was Twitter. Now that's different! I tried to explain how I use Twitter as a professional development tool. I follow links to what my fellow ed tech twitterers are reading, doing, thinking about, arguing about, and I've found lots of interesting material that I never would have seen on my own.

So I will just re-tweet here a post this morning from Ira Socol:

irasocol: Filosophical Friday- If our students could learn as much from a day in school as I do from a day on Twitter we'd be a really educated world.

Social Networking for Professional Development

I'm at the CATESOL conference, and it's been a mixture of wonderful conversations and depressing realizations; wonderful because of the opportunity to see so many colleagues that I don't get to see all the time, and depressing because adult education in California, at least the K12 adult schools, is being cut and curtailed by state budget cuts. The adult level meeting, which is usually full to overflowing, was this time full of empty chairs, and when someone asked how many were from continuing education in the community colleges, more than half the room raised their hands. That means that teachers and coordinators from the K12 adult schools aren't here this year. There was no money for travel. There was also no one from the Adult Education Office of the California Department of Education because they also are not currently allowed to travel.

One of the wonderful parts of being here in Pasadena has been sharing a hotel room with my friend Jan Jarrell from San Diego City College. She used to teach ESL with me at Centre City Adult Education Center in San Diego, and we used to walk at the bay every Thursday and strategize about how to solve the various challenges we perceived in our classes, our program, and the district, not to mention our personal lives. I've missed that since I moved to Sacramento in 2001, and had forgotten how deeply satisfying it is to talk to someone who knows you and your history, and who shares many of your values and beliefs. We don't have to start at the beginning of a conversation, we can start in the middle and still know where we are.

In a year when the opportunities for face-to-face networking are fewer than in previous years, I found myself giving a workshop on Social Networking for Professional Development to a very small audience at the end of a long day. (The slides are posted, and the links on the wiki are just the ones that aren't in the slides.) The audience was small partly because the topic doesn't appear directly related to teaching English to speakers of other languages. But the people who were there, the 3 or 4 intrepid souls who sat up front and really talked with me, were sincerely curious about social networking, and I had the opportunity to share my passion for the subject.

Today I listened to a bunch of episodes from NPR's This I Believe, so let me borrow from their format to articulate here some things I believe:
* I believe we human beings are social animals
* I believe that learning is an innate human drive like sex or the need to find food and shelter - we can't go on for too long without it
* I believe we learn through relationships as much as if not more than through solitary reading and studying
* I believe that we learn through a web of connections between reading, conversations and experiences that interact with each other in some chemical way inside our brains
* I believe that passion is one of the keys to a productive life

In my presentation I talked about Twitter to people who had never seen it, about how many things I've learned from links people have posted there. I talked about Delicious and what an excellent improvement it is to be able to save and tag bookmarks online, and to share them with others and have others share their bookmarks as well. I talked about listservs, and Facebook and LinkedIn, and I realized that I'm still excited and passionate about these things.

I talked about people I've "met" through these networks, like Stephen Downes for instance, someone I will probably never meet in real life, but whose thinking affects my thinking, and my ability to share those thoughts with others. He talks a lot about how ideas are socially generated, and I recently read a biography of Einstein that made me acutely aware of the same thing - ideas are developed socially, feeding off each other, pushing each other, disagreeing with each other. Not to negate the importance of the exceptional brilliance of some minds. I often, in this stage of my life (I'm 61), run smack into the limitations of my own intellect. But Einstein, by putting his ideas out to his field, developed relationships with the other people who were thinking about the same things he was, and through those relationships developed his ideas further. He did that through the social networks that were available to him, but now every one of us has wide social networks available to us. This, to me, is like magic.

Personal Learning Network

David Warlick posted a picture of his personal learning network on his blog, and then twittered about it and got a bunch of questions and responses, and responded to some of those on his blog. It's an interesting idea. I'm thinking of printing the picture, or making my own diagram, and using it as an activity at our next staff meeting. If you have a picture in your head of your personal learning network, does that help you consciously take more advantage of it? I would think so. It would definitely help you see how your learning process has changed over the last 10 years.

My personal learning network certainly involves Twitter, del.icio.us, friends, conferences, colleagues at work, books, articles. He filters all his online input through aggregators. I haven't gotten to that point yet. I still check out links that are sent to me in emails or posted on Twitter. I've received some excellent information that way, and I guess this is an example!

Twitter, Again

My favorite quote so far describing Twitter:
Kevin Honeycutt: “ Twitter is my Cracker Jacks: caramel corn, caramel corn...then a PEANUT..then when you least expect it..a secret toy surprise! You have to put some ingredients in too or you’re just snacking on everyone else’s cracker jacks.”

Intermittent reinforcement is the best for establishing a behavior. So you keep reading the boring stuff because you know eventually there will be another PEANUT!

A guy on the video on that same page uses the metaphor of bees "pollinating all over the place" to talk about Twitter. I feel a metaphor lesson coming on!

Twitter

Alan Lew has a blog post about Twitter, where he has pulled together a bunch of references and discussions, and suggested various educational uses. Twitter is blocked at my work as we have youth correctional sites on our network, so I can't use it as much as I'd like to, Can't even grab a screen shot for this post. But I'm interested in how learners might use this service. It is writing, after all. Is Twitter part of the new literacy?

Twitter: Take Two

Ok, I wrote a few days ago about Twitter that I don't get it - why would I want to get updates constantly about what my friends are doing? But...I got kind of addicted to twittering anyway. It's interesting to see what people are doing, people like Leo Laporte or Veronica Belmont, whose podcasts I've been listening to, and people like Jason Calacanis and Anil Dash who I know hardly anything about but I discovered them through looking at other people's friend lists, or at twitterholic which shows who has the most followers on Twitter.

These people post what they're doing, which is often flying somewhere or having sushi with someone, which is not important unless you're friends with them, but they also post links to their blogs, or blogs of others that they are thinking about, or links to conferences they are attending, and, following those links, I learn things.

Tonight, after a day of work on budgets and getting ready for CATESOL next week, and then a couple of hours of dancing, I came home and sat down to print my boarding pass, etc., and ended up checking my Twitter account, following a few links, reading about tags, about Ajax, about supporting the people of Uganda, and about the relationship between science and culture. I'm liking this! It feels like a time of intellectual ferment and development. These times seem to come and go in life. Maybe I've been missing that.